This invention relates to file systems and file change notification.
Files of a file system in a computer system environment are often subject to change. Such changes will be referred to as file changes and include creating a new file, deleting an existing file, and modifying an existing file. Often, it is necessary to notify applications external to a file system of file changes in the file system.
Information technology (“IT”) applications typically use a so-called “spidering mechanism” to discover changed files. Unfortunately, spidering mechanisms are slow and, consequently, there is a delay, which may be several hours, before applications discover that files have changed. The delay in the discovery of a changed file is referred to as latency.